Monday, December 23, 2013

It's exactly four years since – at a heavyweight conference in
eastern Europe – I heard an expert on the communications apocalypse
predict that, only five years hence, printed newspapers
would be dead and digitally buried. The trends, he said, were clear.
Umm… not exactly. There's an awful lot of perishing left to cram into
the next 12 months, and it shows no sign of happening any time soon.
Indeed, rather the reverse. Bring on Ken Doctor, a great American guru, offering us five, 10 or more 15 years to choose from. Nemesis indefinitely delayed.
And
the most fascinating thing about the ABC-sanctified print circulation
results (for November) involve two politically polar opposites on the
newsstand: the Telegraph and the Guardian. Both belong
to the national quality market. Both, over the years, have cleared out
bulk sales and other devices that prop up or confuse their sales
figures. Both have solid and growing online statistics to boast about:
the Telegraph with 13,855,000 unique visitors and the Guardian with 12,301,000 on the latest UKOM results. They leave everything but the inevitable Mail
online far behind. But what does this mean for print, for copies pushed
across the newsagent's counter or dropped through a letterbox?

Since everybody still knows that nobody knows, studios
continue to show early cuts of films to focus groups, to determine how
to tweak and market them. But even after a film’s release it remains
unclear why it boomed or bombed. Why was “Gravity”, starring George
Clooney and Sandra Bullock in a tale about stranded astronauts, one of
this year’s hits despite the misgivings of its studio, Warner Bros,
whereas “The Lone Ranger” was such a flop, despite Disney’s high hopes
for a film starring Johnny Depp?
“Hollywood is always in crisis,” jokes an unusually
publicity-shy talent agent. Indeed, his office is in Century City, a
district full of high-rises in Los Angeles that was once the backlot of
20th Century-Fox until it had to sell up because of the crippling cost
of its 1963 epic, “Cleopatra”. Faced with bankruptcy 50 years ago, Fox
might have been better off keeping the property and junking the
film-making. The industry’s return on capital has been chronically
anaemic. The media conglomerates that own the major studios grouse about
the lousy economics of the business, particularly since DVD sales
peaked in 2004 and then waned, with consumers shifting to lower-cost
rentals and subscription services like Netflix. Technology should have
helped Hollywood, by lowering the cost of distributing films, but it has
also cost the industry dearly, as film-makers doll up their movies with
expensive special effects, and negative social-media buzz kills films
before they even open.

It’s quite likely that we’ll look back at 2013 as the year when publishing stopped talking about the ‘Netflix’ or ‘Spotify for Books’ and actually did something about it.
eBook subscription services went from being something talked about in
op-ed articles and conference platforms to real-life services, some of
which launched with tens of thousands of titles and support from major
publishers.
Most debate has focused on the fortunes of Oyster, the NYC-based
start-up that launched earlier this year and Scribd, a service that has
pivoted away from document sharing and publishing towards eBook
subscription. Yet these are far from the only eBook subscription
services in town. Another US-based service eReatah also launched earlier
this year. Amazon has entered the market on its own terms, using eBook
lending rather than subscription as a way of boosting membership of the
Amazon Prime program. Meanwhile Europe’s fragmented ereading market is at risk of further fragmentation as country-specific subscription services emerge.
24Symbols continued to do well in its Spanish speaking home market and
two Dutch publishers WPG Uitgevers B.V. and Lannoo Meulenhoff B.V. have
teamed up to create a Netherlands-specific equivalent Riddo.
In Denmark Riidr One addresses the relatively small domestic market
with its own subscription service and in Germany the recently launched
Skoobe boasts a 23,500 strong catalogue.

It’s been another exciting year for the publishing industry – perhaps
the most dynamic in the history of the business. In 2013, all ebooks by
publishers became subject to retailer price controls and ebook prices
plummeted. At the same time, ebook revenue growth has tapered off even
as many of the largest publishers still reported digital gains. A
handful of ebook subscription businesses were launched and libraries won
some key victories in their fight to bring ebooks from all publishers
to their patrons.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Boundless an innovative textbook start-up announced yesterday that they have settled a law suit brought against them by several large pubishing companies which accused the company of copyright violations. (Chronicle)

The publishers’ suit alleged that Boundless had boasted that “they
copy the precise selection, structure, organization, and depth of
coverage of plaintiffs’ textbooks and then map in substitute text, right
down to duplicating plaintiffs’ pagination.” Boundless argued,
however, that the publishers were suing over beta-version material that
was subsequently withdrawn and replaced by offerings built on open
educational resources.
Ariel Diaz, the Boundless founder and chief executive, said in a blog
post on Wednesday that the company “now has a clear path for building
and marketing its OER-driven textbook alternatives without treading upon
the plaintiffs’ rights, and it is confident that it is in compliance
and will not have further legal issues with the plaintiff publishers.”
The publishing companies, he added, “look forward to Boundless operating
its business within the agreed-upon framework,” though he did not say
what that was.

Are tablets really good in encouraging children to get immersed in reading? (Atlantic):

Best-selling children’s author Julia Donaldson, whose picture books
dominate top 10 lists, explains why she vetoed an e-book version of her
most famous title, The Gruffalo, in a 2011 article in the Guardian. “The publishers showed me an e-book ofAlice in Wonderland,”
Donaldson said. “They said, ‘Look, you can press buttons and do this
and that,’ and they showed me the page where Alice’s neck gets longer,”
said Donaldson. “There’s a button the child can press to make the neck
stretch, and I thought, well, if the child’s doing that, they are not
going to be listening or reading.”

The typical argument for interactive stories goes like this: Soon
enough, children will only read on screens, and where readers are going,
publishers must follow. Kate Wilson, the founder of children’s
publisher Nosy Crow argues that publishers must create reading
experiences for touch-screen devices so that children will continue to
read. “We shouldn’t go a little way down the digital path or do it
half-heartedly and with reluctance,” she writes. “We should, I think, go to where our readers are going, and make sure that they read along the way.”

But “Aladdin”, the risk-management platform that occupies all those
computers in the orchards, is not just used to look after BlackRock’s $4
trillion. The firm makes its facilities available in whole or in part
to managers looking after $11 trillion more, a tally that has recently
been growing by about $1 trillion a year. All told, Aladdin keeps its
eyes on almost 7% of the world’s $225 trillion of financial assets. This
is unprecedented—and it means flaws in the system could matter to more
than just BlackRock, its investors and its customers. If that much money
is being managed by people who all think with the same tools, it may be
managed by people all predisposed to the same mistakes.
...
The system is based on a large and, its creators say,
particularly well quality-controlled trove of historical data. On the
basis of that information it uses “Monte Carlo” methods, which produce a
large, randomly generated sample of the huge range of possible futures,
to build up a statistical picture of what could happen to all sorts of
stocks and bonds under a range of future conditions. These risk
assessments cover both likely futures that matter day-to-day, and less
probable but highly salient ones. A portfolio can, say, be stress-tested
by being put through market turmoil modelled on that which followed
Lehman Brothers’ collapse, to see what happens. Users can see their
portfolio’s predicted response to a “tapering” of the Federal Reserve’s
asset-buying programme or to the onset of a global flu pandemic.
The aim is not just to figure out how each stock, bond and
derivative in a portfolio would move. It is also to check how correlated
those movements are, and how that correlation could amplify a shock.
For example: combining shares in an Indonesian bank, a bond issued by a
European power company and a basket of mortgages secured on Canadian
shopping malls might seem like a sensibly diversified portfolio. But
some changes in credit availability might set them all tumbling. That is
the sort of thing that Aladdin, having tracked such assets through
previous crises, is meant to spot. Armed with insights from these
simulations, traders managing large, complex portfolios can tweak their
holdings accordingly.

In theory, this is a fine opportunity for the IT department
to place itself right at the centre of corporate strategy. In practice,
the rest of the company is not always sure that the IT guys are up to
the job—and they are often prepared to buy their own IT from outsiders
if need be. Worse, it seems that a lot of IT guys doubt their own
ability to keep up with the pace of the digital age. According to Dave
Aron of Gartner, a research firm, in a recent survey of chief
information officers around the world just over half agreed that both
their businesses and their IT organisations were “in real danger” from a
“digital tsunami”. “Some feel excited, some feel threatened,” says Mr
Aron, “but nobody feels like it’s boring and business as usual.”
One reason for worry is that IT bosses are conservative by
habit and with good reason. Above all they must keep essential systems
running—and safe. Those systems are under continual attack. If they are
breached, the head of IT carries the can. More broadly, IT departments
like to know who is up to what. Many of them gave up one battle long
ago, by letting staff choose their own smartphones (a trend known as
“bring your own device”). When the chief executive insists on an iPhone
rather than a fogeyish BlackBerry, it is hard to refuse.

Many years ago in one of my annual predictions, I suggested great things would come from digital distribution of movie films obviating the need to physical film distribution. We may finally be there. Economist

This new breed of programming is made possible by the spread
of digital technology. Cinemas no longer rely on the delivery of 35mm
reels, now that pictures can be delivered over satellite or broadband
connections. Cinema-owners can make fuller use of their screens, and
audiences see delights they would otherwise miss. “We have a presence in
78 Mexican cities,” says Alejandro Ramirez, the boss of Cinépolis,
which runs plush cinemas in the Americas and India. “In the vast
majority of these cities, there is no opera,” he notes. So far this year
nearly 300,000 people worldwide have gone to see opera and other
“alternative programming”, such as “Cirque du Soleil 3D”, a circus
performance, at Cinépolis’s theatres.
Cinema-owners want to do more than beam in events. For
instance, Tim Richards, the founder of Vue Cinemas, which operates
chains in Europe and Taiwan, predicts that theatres will be rented
during off-peak hours to video-game players to display contests on the
big screen. “We are not trying to displace Hollywood films,” he says.
“All we are trying to do is make better use of the assets we have.”

Thursday, December 12, 2013

When the first big scholarly e-book programmes launched six or seven
years ago there was plenty of excitement about putting e-books and
e-journals on the same platform so that they could be searched together
and this trend has continued.
As Michael Cairns, chief operating
officer online at Publishing Technology, observed: ‘Over the course of
the last few years there has been a recognition that there is benefit to
integrate not just books and journals but also conference proceedings.’

...

Publishing Technology, which also creates and hosts platforms for a
range of publishers, has observed similar things. ‘On the journals side
we always have issues with format for ingest and always anticipate some
back and forth to get things how the customer wants,’ said Cairns.
‘Typically, we specify to publishers that we require XML but there are
always exceptions and problems – especially with converting archives.’

And
he said that the challenges are greater with e-books. ‘Books haven’t
been online as long, so the issues are more basic. Often we will get a
full book PDF that we need to break down into chapters – and metadata is
often provided at the book level rather than at the chapter level.’
In
addition, he noted that many things such as indexing, endnotes and
footnotes work well in print book navigation – but in the online world,
especially in content ingestion, these are problematic. ‘Even within
publishing houses, processes are not consistent,’ he observed.

Monday, December 09, 2013

"I often joke that the only way to get
published in Britain if you're French is to pretend you're Spanish. If
you've been a best-seller in France, it's a sure-fire recipe for not
getting a deal in the UK. "As for US publishers, they're so convinced that with 350
million potential readers and a big stable of American writers, they've
got everything covered - every genre, every style. So why bother?" The costs and difficulty of literary translation are clearly
part of the problem. So too is the fact that the Anglophone book market
is thriving - so the demand for foreign works is limited. Some French authors are critical of Anglo-Saxon "complacency".
...
"Personally I am fed up with all the stereotypes," says Darieussecq.
"We're not intellectual. We're not obsessed with words. We write
detective stories. We write suspense. We write romance.
"And it's about time you started noticing."

About the middle of October, a number of news organization websites
started to see huge numbers of visitors flowing from Facebook.
Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel reported that Buzzfeed and its partner sites had seen traffic from Facebook surge 69 percent between August and October.
The change wasn’t out of nowhere. In August, a Facebook corporate blog post hinted
that the algorithm that controlled the site’s News Feed was changing
slightly, such that “stories that people did not scroll down far enough
to see can reappear near the top […] if the stories are still getting
lots of likes and comments.”
It sounds like a little change, but it’s hard to overstate the
importance of the News Feed. The feed is what you see when you log into Facebook.com;
it’s essentially the homepage of the site, and it changes for every
user. What dictates how it looks is the elusive News Feed algorithm, a
program that decides not only which statuses, photos, and news stories
should display, but how many of each there will be. And a traffic jump
of the size Warzel reported could only come with a change in the News
Feed algorithm.
...Enter Upworthy. Simultaneous to this traffic upheaval, an entire vocabulary and syntax for headlines that people click and share—and oh, boy, do they click and share—had
presented itself on the social web. For publishers trying to grab more
traffic from Facebook, the path became clear. Borrow, adapt, employ the
Upworthy style post haste. Assure readers your content was nothing but wondtacular. And so began the wondtacularization.

The research presented on Thursday was perhaps best
summarized by research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania
Graduate School of Education, which analyzed the study habits of 1
million students across 16 Coursera courses between June of 2012 and
2013. “Emerging data ... show that massive open online courses
(MOOCs) have relatively few active users, that user ‘engagement’ falls
off dramatically especially after the first 1-2 weeks of a course, and
that few users persist to the course end,” a summary of the study reads. For anyone who has paid even the slightest bit of attention
to the MOOC space over the past year, those conclusions hardly qualify
as revelations. Yet some presenters said they felt the first day of the
conference served as an opportunity to confirm some of those commonly
held beliefs about MOOCs.

Publishers have long bemoaned Africa's lack of a "book culture" but some hope that the advent of smartphones and the internet could help change this, writes journalist Chris Matthews. The 566% increase in worldwide internet usage since the start of the millennium might appear staggering but not when compared with Africa, where online activity has grown by an astonishing 3,606%. More than 160 million people are now connected throughout the continent, mostly on mobile phones. With internet access surging and connectivity increasing, the doors are being thrown open to digital publishing. All of which suggests a new chapter has been started since Kenyan publisher Henry Chakava's withering attack on Africa's book culture back in 1997.

Wednesday, December 04, 2013

Information Today magazine asked me and some other pundits to think about what we may see in 2014:

There were plenty of newsworthy events in 2013, from acquisitions
(Elsevier acquired Knovel, Swets acquired JSTOR ebooks), to ebooks
(Ingram added an ebook lending model to MyiLibrary, Apple was tried for
ebook price fixing), to MOOCs (institutions such as edX and Coursera
offered topics including 21st Century American Foreign Policy,
Introduction to Computer Science, and Embedded Systems: Shape the
World). Tablet computers and apps gained in popularity, while previously
favored devices such as BlackBerry found their customer bases
declining.
So what’s likely to make headlines in 2014? Industry professionals
John Blossom, Michael Cairns, Roy Kaufman, and Pat Sabosik offer their
insights about the cloud, massive open online courses (MOOCs), Big Data,
open access (OA), and the Internet of Things:

The evolution of MOOCs will also become entwined with some broader
issues of higher education effectiveness, cost, and access. More
universities will see MOOCs as a means of managing some or all of these
issues at a local level, whether they’re looking to reduce tuition
(and/or operating expenses), provide more course offerings, or expand
beyond their traditional market or catchment area. Experimentation will
also include local testing of MOOCs used in combination with small
in-class/in-person structures: This will provide more immediate social
interactions and communication with colleagues while, at the same time,
capitalizing on the “star professor” and the wide exposure to other
student backgrounds that MOOCs can provide.

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

Lots and hype and hyperbole about Amazon.com this week. At least Scott Pelley at 60mins went right to the top and managed to keep his hands clean. As you probably know by now, Amazon is going to deliver your toys to you with a toy helicopter.

Amazon is the world's largest
online retailer, serving 225M customers worldwide. What's next for the
company that prides itself on disrupting tradition? Charlie Rose
interviews Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos.

Other reporters tried out the drudgery of working in a warehouse to see how they were treated. Guardian.

For a week, I was an Amazon elf: a temporary worker who got a job
through a Swansea employment agency – though it turned out I wasn't the
only journalist who happened upon this idea. Last Monday, BBC's Panorama
aired a programme that featured secret filming from inside the same
warehouse. I wonder for a moment if we have committed the ultimate media
absurdity and the show's undercover reporter, Adam Littler, has
secretly filmed me while I was secretly interviewing him. He didn't, but
it's not a coincidence that the heat is on the world's most successful
online business. Because Amazon is the future of shopping; being an
Amazon "associate" in an Amazon "fulfilment centre" – take that for
doublespeak, Mr Orwell – is the future of work; and Amazon's payment of
minimal tax in any jurisdiction is the future of global business. A
future in which multinational corporations wield more power than
governments.

Instead, I think Bezos is up to something much more practical. By
unveiling a huge drone program in progress, he's sending a message to
the FAA regulators and Senate committees who are currently considering how unmanned aircraft can be used commercially. And that message is: Don't even think about getting in our way.
By floating a teaser about the drone program, and allowing the public
to freak out about it, he's showing regulators how popular such a scheme
would be, and how much backlash they'd face if they outlawed it.

Also, NYMag will now go to bi-monthly printing rather than weekly. There's an iPad version.

"New York has evolved dramatically since its founding in 1968,
with its intelligence, humor, playfulness, and visual punch remaining
constants," editor-in-chief Adam Moss said in a statement. "Readers will
continue to find what they love in the magazine, and we're undertaking
these new changes to meet their changing media habits on all platforms." The company did not address any financial reasons for its print publishing cuts in the statement. Nymag.com will have a new science blog, and more photography and political and cultural coverage, according to New York Media.

The
elderly who die today still leave behind an attic full of relics for
children and grandchildren to rifle through: boxes of love letters and
photos documenting the family history. But increasingly, such
memorabilia is password-protected and stored online. Many wedding albums
exist only on Flickr. The history of courtship and falling in love
among today’s young newlyweds is documented on Facebook and in text messages.

“Look how awful people are when they fight over the couch or
dad’s graduation ring,” says Josh Slocum, president of the Funeral
Consumers Alliance, an advocacy group. “I can only imagine what the
fight will look like over dad’s computer files.”
In the US, such questions fall into the messy intersection
of state property laws, federal privacy laws and corporate policies of
the companies housing online accounts.

A handful of US states have passed laws addressing the treatment of digital remains.
In Oklahoma and Idaho, digital data are treated like tangible property.
The executor of a will can take control of social networking or email
accounts the same as bank accounts and houses, and decide to continue
operating them or shut them down. In Indiana, a law allows access to
those accounts but not control. In Rhode Island and Connecticut, only
access to email accounts is covered.

The Atlantic notes the awarding to Oren Teicher as PW Person of the Year:

This year's selection for PW's Person of the Year
represents a wholly different approach to the honor. It is Oren Teicher,
CEO of the American Booksellers Association, and the ABA's board of
directors, the organization that represents the country's independent
book stores. The fact that these traditional brick-and-mortar, mainly
locally owned bookstores are being recognized as outstanding
contributors to publishing is not merely a sympathetic gesture to
old-fashioned commerce in a generally downward trajectory. The accolade
is justified by results defying the odds that so heavily favor the
Amazon juggernaut and the chain stores, still led by (the struggling)
Barnes & Noble.

From Twitter;
Yahoo’s Flickr Resurgence Continues With Handsome Photo Books, But Reliance On Sets Could Stumble TechcrunchPrompt.ly Raises $1.5M Seed To Become The OpenTable For Time And Services TechcrunchBecksistentialism: because man is a goal-seeking animal TheConversation

Michael Cairns

I enjoy discussing the publishing industry and in particular the changes that impact the business. On PND, I don't write about everything, just the things that interest me.

My career spans a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and my operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer.

I have served as a board member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and in addition to my responsibilities at R.R. Bowker, l also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.